Hardware versus software.
Keegan Smith here for ATG for Coaches.
Where should we be starting when we work with athletes?
Should we be focusing on the hardware or should we be focusing on the software?
I’m going to make a case from my perspective on this and I want you to consider where you're focusing and it might help you to put things into a lens when you're looking at programs when you're looking at working with someone new.
I’m going to start with this concept of the muscle number because it's good to quantify what we're actually talking about.
It's a quantification of body composition or at least the maximum amount of muscle mass that someone can hold. It's kind of like the natty number.
If you've got into like natural bodybuilding, a height-adjusted fat-free mass index is basically the number, and then I times it by 4 to get the muscle number, just to make it a bit more sensitive, it makes 100 the natty number a height-adjusted fat-free mass index of 25 is pretty elite and that makes the 100.
Obviously, some people are going to go well beyond that naturally just by variation between individuals.
Once body fat goes up then the muscle number kind of goes out the window because we don't really have good quantification tools.
It needs to be kind of like versus like.
If people have similar body compositions then the muscle number is a really useful tool to help to understand exactly where someone is at, and where they fit on this spectrum.
There's a level that has never been reached naturally and then there's questionable and then there's if you work really hard, you're probably going to get their kind of levels and this is relevant to this discussion because when we're talking about upgrading the hardware.
How much potential for upgrading the hardware is there?
Muscle number.
I used this with NRL players as a feedback mechanism for how close they were to ideal for their position or even for their sport.
In rugby league, it's quite homogenous meaning that most players are actually quite similar in terms of their muscle number.
There's differences in height for different positions but the muscle number doesn't actually vary that much.
I did find that the average muscle number in NRL was around about 97, 98, near that maximal natural muscle development number without them really even focusing on bodybuilding.
A lot of them do during their teens but then not so much after that.
I also found that just in terms of muscle mass and mass in general that representative players were on average three kilos heavier than regular players.
Before I went back to work with the Catalan dragons in 2010, I fully indexed the whole league I wrote down the body weights of every player in the whole league as well as the state representative teams.
Basically like the all-stars and then the national team and I found that there was a really strong correlation with body weight.
The average weight of the national team was heavier than either of the state teams which was heavier than any of the top teams and then interestingly the latter, the bottom teams were the lightest teams and the top teams were the heaviest teams and there were a couple of outliers as you would expect because obviously mass is not the only factor but it is a huge factor in a sport like a rugby league and then if you say that strength is going to be correlated with mass which it generally is, then you have some really powerful evidence to suggest that you can have a huge impact on results based on optimizing body composition.
Muscle mass optimization doesn't always mean they need more but muscle mass optimization and distribution is the muscle mass in the upper body, is the muscle mass in the lower body, is going to be really important for us to consider if we're optimizing performance and then we can look at body fat.
Body fat we can change faster than muscle mass.
Muscle mass takes time.
Body fat can be stripped pretty quickly or it can be put on pretty quickly and that will have a significant impact on performance.
I did some research on CrossFit when I was first looking at this and I found that there's a certain level that you must have to be elite and all the top guys were significantly above where most people's natural muscle mass potential is.
That's not saying that they're all using anabolic agents.
If you look at CrossFit, they're training two, three, four times a day with high reps and they're the elite out of thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of participants.
It makes sense that some of them are going to be above what would be naturally possible in any strength sport.
Anabolics become a question, a consideration, something that is going to pop up from time to time depends on the sport and depends on the country on how much that comes into play.
These numbers can help you to say “you've got great skills in CrossFit or in rugby league but you are giving away an advantage of 5%, 10% to other people who are at the highest level in your sport.”
We can't have that. We need to move that closer.
If someone has much better technique, if they're much more skillful then they'll be able to give away an advantage to a certain extent.
But it doesn't often play out this way like strength and optimized muscle mass is a huge factor in athletic performance.
Hardware versus software.
Where are you going to focus?
We have to get the hardware right.
If the hardware is right then the journey to elite is much simpler.
This guy on the right here it's going to take him a while.
I love into the wild the book is really good as well.
If you're interested in a read.
But it's going to take him a long time to be competitive CrossFit after he's done this.
There's no system of neurological development.
There's no certain isometrics and holds and tricks and bossy balls and swiss balls that are going to allow this guy to compete in CrossFit or in rugby anytime soon.
It doesn't matter what you do with neurological development, there is no hope.
The hardware should always be the buy-in.
It's always the primary focus to get someone to where they need to be in terms of their hardware.
Just understanding this concept can help you to avoid a lot of the pitfalls of modern strength training.
There's a lot of stuff out there that is good when you're already working with super elite guys and it can help them to stay super elite but we want to be able to develop people and take them from wherever they are now to where they want to be and using development exercises and develop an understanding that that's our priority.
Development. Improving the hardware is where we need to focus and where we need to start then we can just decrease a lot of distractions and we can get a much much better result.
I’m going to show you some examples of the coaches that focus most on hardware.
Dmitry Klokov competed at the highest level in weightlifting for a significant period of time.
It wasn't that long between when he stopped competing professionally that he did a bodybuilding competition and he looked good.
If you look at the Chinese weightlifters they look like natural bodybuilders.
They're at a good standard for natural bodybuilding using a lot of heavy strength training.
Again the question of anabolics can be considered but what I want you to think about is that the hardware is the buy-in.
You don't you just don't get to compete if you're giving away a significant advantage in terms of muscle mass then there's no point.
A little story here went to Dmitry Klokov, Charles Poliquin seminar at Clean Health in 2014 and it was meant to be about sort of athletic development and performance.
Charles in the morning Klokov in the afternoon.
I won't talk too much about the event but what Klokov was able to do at those events like demonstrating his strength.
He was snatching all around the world.
He was on that tour, he was snatching around 200 kilos from a deficit.
Executing his movements day and day out and he basically just mocked everyone who was there just saying “don't even bother working on your technique in weightlifting just do really slow strength work, deficit deadlifts, slow back squats, slow front squats, and get strong.”
He believed that strength was built through slow movements and he basically said “don't even worry about learning your technique until you can do this.”
He also had the buy-in of athletic range.
He can put his body in positions that are very uncommon but he was a huge fan of slow strength and a huge fan, like long pauses as well and a huge fan of range and that's your buy-in.
That's why it was kind of funny you guys been here because you're just not strong enough and the way you get strong is with the slow lifts.
That was really his take on it.
I think it's really an athlete's perspective.
You can look at the role of speed strength as well in strength development but he's right, you have to give your body that tension and that time to develop muscle and to activate the nervous system to be able to do anything significant.
Now we're going to jump to the other end of the spectrum, I've been chatting with Kadour Ziani a little bit.
Recently he's able to kick the ball out from the ring.
Probably the only human in the world that can do that as far as I know.
Look at these legs they don't look like Dmitry Klokov.
What I want to make you aware of here and sort of share because some of you guys might have been tuning out of like “well yeah look I’m not into bodybuilding, I don't really want to be heavy, there's no benefit to that in my sport, my goals.”
Ziani is still hardware dominant.
You have to have the tendons and the connective tissues that allow you to keep coming back to your performance.
That's the big thing.
That's the superpower.
The superpower is being unbreakable and our first priority as strength coaches is to make our athletes unbreakable.
Our first priority as ATG coaches is to allow people to go and do their thing.
If you can keep going and doing your thing, if people were able to train, go and dunk like twice a day and get out there over and over and over again without injury, you would improve quickly.
The ability to put back-to-back sessions together to go and play, most professional athletes have had a time of what we would consider overtraining.
Even if you look at like Ed Cohen and guys like that.
Like Ed Cohen was just training weights for like three, four hours after school each day and he talks about “It was so silly the way I trained and it was over training and I could have made better gains.”
Almost every athlete has that story of ridiculously high volume training.
Ben did it as well with his skill development, with the balls.
Most professional soccer players, they played soccer for hours and hours a day as children like just played and played and played and played.
The ability to just play a lot is a key factor.
Of course, you want to be going for quality but if you're getting that feedback for example in dunking then you know whether you're getting better, whether you're jumping well, or whether you're not and so the hardware dominance of these athletes is in the connective tissues.
That's the factor that we need to look at here.
Stefan Holm. If we look at these lower legs versus the upper arms, lower body strength versus upper body strength, and muscle mass. The strength is going to correlate with muscle mass.
You can see some significant calves there and the peroneus, the lateral calf, you can see a huge development in that left leg and I think that's his pliant leg, it actually looks significantly bigger than the other one in this picture.
What are we going to see in these guys, we're going to see that they optimize, they have the amount of muscle mass that they need in their lower legs to be able to execute and optimize muscle mass in the upper body.
It's going to be a lot less but it's still hardware dominance, the dominance is in the connective tissues and optimized level of muscle mass.
The amount of muscle mass does not correlate with the amount of connective tissue.
That's an important distinction that we need to make.
There are bodybuilders and you'll see this with guys with steroids, the muscle blows up quite quickly and they don't really know how to develop the tendons and therefore they have all this muscle tissue that can produce this ratcheting force that we've been looking at with the short-range, etc.
I understand to able to produce a lot of force there but the elastic bands and the levers are not developed to anywhere near the same extent.
Jumping to a different one here.
Every performance has an optimal body composition.
This is Bob Peoples deadlifting.
Look at it, they got the weights tied there I never even noticed that before, the weights tied there to the bar in the middle as well.
They weren't expecting anyone to lift that much.
He'd had lifted 330 kilograms at 82 kilograms body weight almost 100 years ago now and you'll notice his specialization, his body is built for deadlifting.
He was actually quite, he was a state-level weightlifter as well, snatches and cleans.
He was a really good all-rounder but if you look at those arms, he was really built for his sport.
The hardware is always an important factor to consider and the bones definitely do come into that as well as muscles, tendons, ligaments, etc.
Acceleration-deceleration plus external load.
You want to look like this.
If you have to be able to stop and go and run over other people or and run with people on your back then these are the guys that you want to look more like.
You don't want to look like Kadour Ziani or Stefan Holm but not everybody wants to compete in these sports so it's important to consider what are the best in the sport doing. What do they look like and how do we get closer to that?
These guys need to dominate collisions of bodies, they need to be able to run with other people trying to pull them to the ground, and therefore strength is going to have a much bigger factor.
There's more muscle dominance, there's more muscle development in these pictures but the connective tissue is still the winner.
When the connective tissue doesn't keep up with the muscle, if we train for muscle dominance, if we train to that too far then we lose.
There's a spectrum between being really muscle dominant and being really tendon dominant and there's only so far you can go along this before you're going to have tendon pain or you're going to have ligament rupture.
We need to have this framework of thinking about upgrading athletes but keeping the tendon, and the connective tissue development in line with the muscle development.
If we look at acceleration-deceleration without external load.
I had the plus there plus external load with minus external load on this one.
If the if they're not going to get pulled to the ground.
You might argue with both soccer and basketball, they are actually quite physical sports in terms of bumping bodies and if you watch the highlights of Adama Traoré they consistently try and knock him over and all these highlights are basically him being a pinball and he just doesn't go to ground and he's very difficult to knock down.
He's also extremely fast and very skillful.
He has more muscle mass than most football players.
Charles Poliquin once described soccer players as Care Bears on valium watching the English Premier League as watching Care Bears on valium or Teletubbies on valium maybe well same kind of image.
Why did he say that? He said that because they're so slow.
Why are they so slow? Because they have low relative muscle mass.
You simply can't have great acceleration with low levels of muscle mass.
The best acceleration in the world often doesn't even come from sprinters, it's in some other testing you'll see that shot putters and weight lifters actually have better acceleration and you get that because it's reliant on the muscle mechanism, it's about acceleration.
The muscle is the primary driver of acceleration where connective tissues play a much bigger role in top speed.
If you look at these guys, they're outliers in their sport, they're at the top in terms of money and results and they also have better specific muscle mass development.
What you'll see also with LeBron James, lower body dominance.
You see big legs there.
He's a big man, his arms aren't tiny either.
None of these guys have tiny arms but they're not upper body dominant and they do have big legs.
If you're not going to deal with having to run over people and full-on collisions then this is something like the optimal body composition. so you can see the three kinds of bodies next to each other.
Body types.
Louis Simmons, one of the legends of strength.
If you look at who are the most influential people, who are the most disliked people in strength, Louis Simmons, I actually had it as Lewis, and then it auto-corrected me I think anyways so
Louis Simmons, extreme strength.
His gym is extremely famous for the physics of strength and he cares more about the ability to accelerate and to be the ability to drag sleds and jump and things like that.
A lot more than other powerlifters and for that, he's heavily criticized.
The specificity rule exists and powerlifters can be very specific to powerlifting and get decent results.
What Louie does is keep powerlifters human which is phenomenal.
He gives them the ability to remain human at the same time as powerlift.
These guys can actually run and jump and they can carry they can drag sleds.
They may not be great runners but they're going to be a lot better than most of what's out there.
What's missing from Louie’s system is they don't need to run.
There's a huge emphasis on the physics of force production and I think he's done a better job of
that than anyone out there it does work very well.
In 2013 the year that the roosters dominated, Louis Simmons's influence was massive on the way I programmed for the guys.
I’d been to see Phil Richards who was the first Louis Simmons or Westside Barbell certified coach in Europe and interestingly Phil also did a lot of education with Charles in the very early days before the certifications and things like that.
He went over to intern with Charles and then he also was a student of Louie.
We did a lot of max effort work.
We did a lot of singles and it worked.
Louie in terms of physics and force, you can't go past him.
Absolutely love what he's done.
Charles understood how to optimize body composition.
He's the best bodybuilding coach ever to go into professional sports.
He did so much in this.
There are so many areas that he contributed but I think Ben was sort of talking about the other day that maybe what killed him is that people didn't get it.
He was quite frustrated and spoke very very strongly about people not getting it.
Strength coaches not getting it and strength coaches doing all sorts of stuff that doesn't increase the hardware, doesn't develop the hardware, and focuses on the software but they're working with athletes that are nowhere near where they need to be able to perform at the level that they want to perform.
What it says here is demonstrating strength is not equal to building strength.
When someone's doing weight lifting concentric dominant movements, they're not going to build strength in the same way as what Klokov was talking about and what Charles has always spoken about which is controlling the weight.
You have to control the weight, to develop strength, to build strength, to build the muscular component, to build muscle mass.
It's the eccentric components, the isometrics, and the ability to go slow and control the weight is what's going to create that muscle.
You can demonstrate strength in acceleration movements and at some volume, if you're just doing lots of concentric dominant movement kind of like CrossFit does, then you can develop muscle mass as well but the efficient, safe way to build muscle mass is not through just demonstrating strength, Klokov was really clear about that.
Charles is really clear about that.
Westside Barbell System is really clear about that.
They don't develop their squat bench deadlift by squatting, benching, and deadlifting, they have the exact same philosophy as Charles, in my interpretation that you have to optimize the muscle mass and the strength of the individual muscles at the correct joint angles to get the result that you want.
The correct join angles is where the final piece of this puzzle comes in.
For Ben Patrick, the correct joint angles, that's the big contribution of ATG and I’m working hard with Ben to optimize this system and when I saw what Ben had done for the knees in terms of optimizing the angles and the lower body in general, the knees and ankles especially, it was really really clear that he was using the technology that Charles had developed in a different way that makes more sense for athletes.
This is kind of the lineage that I believe Ben and ATG are progressing.
To transfer the Poliquin method which was primarily used for athletes but then it became a lot about bodybuilding.
Charles published a lot about arm training and I think he always had that frustration, he came through a different time where in order for him to do well as a business, he needed to kind of copyright his information and keep it close to his chest and it wasn't really the same opportunity to scale at that stage.
Athletic training wasn't much of a thing.
Some of you young guys, you haven't seen that world but before CrossFit, though it was very very rare to see anyone doing Olympic weightlifting and strength and conditioning facilities, they basically didn't exist in most of the world.
There were some in the US but it wasn't something that everyday people wanted to do.
There wasn't that same business opportunity.
The opportunity for ATG really comes on the back of the CrossFit movement as well as taking what we've learned from Charles and applying it to the specific joint positions required for running.
That's why the Westside System and Joe DeFranco, his Westside for Skinny Bastards obviously heavily influenced by Louis Simmons and it works for short-term peaking and force production and it works until it doesn't work and when it doesn't work is when the Achilles snaps, it's when the ACL snaps and that was Ben's experience.
Box squatting heavy for a bunch of time and then his Achilles, his ACL snapped.
The joint angles really matter because that has a huge impact on the connective tissues.
To clarify this, to wrap it up, muscle-dominant athletes, these guys need to be able to run over other humans, to run with people on their back, and to move a lot of weight.
CrossFitters would go into this category as well.
For these guys, you need that muscle number of a hundred.
Sonny has a muscle number of 110, at eight percent body fat, and seven percent body fat.
He actually has to work hard to sort of stay under 110 muscle number and there are people who are outliers in the world, it makes sense that they're going to be outliers in every direction.
When you see him running, you watch them on the field, on television, etc, it's not the same.
When you see him running and you think about putting your body in front of that to stop it, you understand why he was able to get so many offloads and put guys through holes and things because of the physical presence that he has, that he commands.
He was able to play sevens. He went to the Olympics for Rugby Sevens.
At that size, it's just phenomenal and you will see a lot of the Fijians have these kinds of traits as well.
If you want someone, you want to coach people that dominate in these muscle-dominant sports, then you want to move towards where the greatest players have been.
What their physiques are like?
If you're a rugby league fan.
Look at guys like Jonah Lomu.
Look at guys Andrew Jones was heavy for his position, he was nearly 100 kilos later in his career, 95- 96 kilos, not very tall.
Brad Fittler. A lot of the guys even in those sorts of positions were just heavier, they had a lot more muscle mass than their opposition and that's part of the picture.
As the strength coach, as the ATG coach, we need to get that hardware.
These guys would be considered mixed dominance so they're not muscle dominant, they have extremely well-developed elastic qualities but they're not minimizing their muscle mass in the upper body to the extent of these really connective tissue dominant individuals.
You can make your decision of where you want to sit on the spectrum.
You always need your tendons and ligaments to outpace the development of your muscles and customizing our training, understanding how to use range, how to use speed to maintain that connective tissue dominance so that the ACL does not snap, so the Achilles does not snap and so the bicep tendon does not snap.
This is really what we've been learning about in athletic range is giving you the tools to be able to do that.
I’m not going to focus a lot on the negative but what I am going to say is if we're not developing the hardware, then we're not doing our jobs.
If we're not developing the hardware, we're not doing our jobs.
There's a place for software. Mostly it's done on the field with skill development and playing your sport.
That is the biggest place where that is done and then we do want to provide some overload in terms of skill development specific to what people are going to do on the field but we've gone too far in modern methods of I don't know what you call it but it doesn't work, it doesn't create the hardware gains.
If you take someone who's already a super elite athlete and you do software upgrades with them you can barely tell whether anything's happening but maybe it works.
You take this guy on the right, you take these kids on the left and you just keep providing them with skill development training, making them do speed ladders, they will never make it.
That is not how you turn someone who's not going to make it into someone who is going to make it.
Look at Ben Patrick's story.
Look at the story of Adam Archuleta and there are so many stories out there of developing the hardware to be able to do the job and get to the next level.
If we want these guys to make it as professional athletes, we have to optimize the hardware and focus on that as the primary priority.
Every performance has an ideal body composition.
Muscle mass is an important advantage for most sports and therefore if you become a bodybuilding coach to some degree, then you are likely to experience more success.
If you can bring into that tendon and connective tissue development to outpace muscle gains, then your athletes are going to remain extremely resilient at the same time as getting to this optimal body composition.
This is really the holy grail.
We've just started the athletic muscle training program and this is really what we're putting together for the first time I think a program that has massive muscle gain development with ATG technology.
Range is in there, the athletic range.
The results that are possible with this kind of training are not possible with any other training system that I've seen.
I've been researching this stuff fanatically for 20 years and we're doing something different and we can expect different results.
We are seeing different results.
There are a lot of professional athletes and teams that are using this approach right now.
Not much of it is public. There is a competitive advantage to be had at the moment and we want you to have that competitive advantage and we want to change the way the world trains.
It's not about keeping this a secret.
It's about getting it out there to everybody so everybody gets to play the game and it works for a period of time to just train the sport and some people will get by without doing a lot of weight training but it works until it doesn't work and after it doesn't work then we need to know how to re-engineer human ability and that's what ATG does, it's re-engineering human ability so that you get to play again.
Strength is 300 to 500 trainable.
You look at those arms. Charles was not able to lift.
He probably added five times the weight to the bar so maybe he started with 15-kilo curls and got to 70-kilo curls and it's extremely trainable and that's why we need to work on it, that's why it works, that's why strength training has to be there and for a long time, I thought of it as like a necessary evil of like “well these guys just have to have muscle mass, I know it's taking away from their child-like abilities but they have to have muscle mass. There is no alternative.”
But there is an alternative, the alternative is ATG system and I believe it's going to impact every other training system and change the way athletes are trained and therefore go and impact the whole of humanity.
Every human used to be able to run, throw, carry, that's what we're born with, the ability to do.
Now we need to re-engineer ourselves to be able to recapture those abilities.
The neural gains, the software upgrades, and updates they're not even 100% trainable.
Reaction time is not close to 100% trainable.
Skill development definitely has its part to play but if someone is already doing the thing that they want to do a lot if they've already practiced this sport a lot, then you're going to get very minimal changes.
That's why the role of the ATG coach can have a huge impact on the career of somebody because strength is so trainable and that creates significant changes in acceleration ability and top speed.
Ben is the pin-up for this, of going from being super slow and not able to touch the rim to massive dunks and running world-class 40-yard times.
I think we're going to see a lot of other people replicating and duplicating this result.
There are already a lot. There's so many case studies.
I’m chatting with guys all the time who've competed at world-class levels and then succumbed to injury and now they're back to doing what they weren't able to do before.
It is happening and we're going to just see more and more of it.
Children versus adults.
Children are connective tissue dominant but they lack the acceleration and force mechanism.
So that connective tissue dominance means they can go and jump off something that's as tall as them onto the ground and their body doesn't mind.
Their connective tissues are strong.
Most children have this freedom and ability that most adults have lost.
They also tend to be very flexible until the chair life eventually catches up with them which can happen earlier and earlier depending on how much chair exposure children are getting but the natural ability of the child is with their connective tissue and their flexibility but they lack the force production.
12-year-olds playing against 16-year-olds in Rugby, it doesn't end well for the 12-year-olds.
My goal in coaching the NRL team, the City Roosters, the goal was for them to be the 16-year-olds, to have that physical dominance advantage.
The other team gets more injuries not that you're trying to injure the other team but it's just the nature of the sport.
If you're significantly ahead of the other team, just like the 16-year-olds versus the 12-year-olds, the 12-year-olds are going to get injured as well as lose.
You're looking for that physical competitive advantage.
That is the nature of the sport whether we should compete or not is another question entirely but the goal, I’m all for human achievement, and sport is one way that we can demonstrate human achievement.
We want to give our athletes this ability to be physically dominant and that continues to push and
inspire the standards of competitors and all other humans.
Strength training must improve force production while re-engineering child-like abilities.
We need to get back to these childlike abilities but still have that muscle, the adequate amount of muscle to be able to perform the tasks that we want to perform.
Hardware versus software.
Hardware dominance is clear.
The distraction of software focus training is causing a lot of issues.
If we develop hardware only in certain ranges of motion, then those other ranges of motion will be at risk.
If we develop a lot of muscle but we don't develop a lot of tendon and ligament strength, especially in the positions that are going to impact performance most, then we're not going to get the results that we want.
Yes, let's make more hardware dominant athletes and understand that this philosophy, this underpinning of where we start and where we go with someone needs to be very clear.
I’d love to hear your feedback on this.
If it's making sense.
How you understand these concepts.
Let's talk again soon.
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